Security Policy

Preamble

Security is a vital part of any software that deal with authentication. Security will be our first and last thought when considering contributions. We tried to keep this package as small as possible to allow users as well as developers to comprehend security implications.

Reporting a Vulnerability

Please do not use GitHub's issue tracker for vulnerability reports. Please contact maintainers directly via email available on their GitHub profiles.

Security concepts for known risks

Cross-Site-Request-Forging (CSRF)

We use the csrf_protect decorator to enforce Django's CSRF protection on all or views. This is also why we only support POST requests.

Session injection / poisoning

Django's session engines, especially the signed_cookies engine, try to prevent session injection as much as possible. However, you should make sure, that you do not use user input as a session key anywhere in your application. An attacker could use this as an attack vector.

Misconfiguration

Configuration options are kept to a minimum. We prefer user extending behavior by the means of inheritance to ensure a better understanding of the behavior.

Custom permission check method (PERMISSION_CHECK) require keyword arguments only to avoid argument mismatching.

Permission escalation

Writing custom permission check functions is highly dangerous. If you create your own permission check, make sure to test your implementation against all possible scenarios to prevent permission escalation.

Undeliberate action

The built-in hijack notification can only be permanently hidden by setting the HIJACK_INSERT_BEFORE setting to None. To protect users from performing operations as another user without their knowledge, it should only be set to None if an equivalent global notification has been built into your project - for example, in a project-wide layout file.

Session expiration extension

Hijack does not extend a users original session life. If the original user is due for reauthentication, the session will expire as it used to.

Session leaking

Hijack uses Django's login utility function, that flushes the session every time a users is being hijacked or released ensure that no session data leaks from one user to another. The only exception is the session expiry which is transferred from one session to another.